Robert A Pape
Biographic Data
| ID | 1418192 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert A Pape |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert A |
| FAMILY NAME | Pape |
| SIGNATURE | PAPE R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6622-1103 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 794 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
How to Estimate Public Support for Political Violence and Why It Matters: Impact of Sampling, Engagement Checks, and Question Phrasing
What is the true level of support for political violence in the United States? The answer to this question is extremely important to understanding the level of threat to American democracy, as well as how best to respond. Critics have argued that previous works by political scientists have drastically overstated the level of support for political violence, by 600 percent or more, due to disengaged respondents and poor question wording in surveys.…
Understanding the Impact of Military Service on Support for Insurrection in the United States
Why do some individuals with military experience support the insurrection of January 6? With US military veterans playing a central role in the assault on the US Capitol, answering this question is of immediate scholarly and policy concern. To better understand the impact of military service, we conducted the first nationally representative survey of support for pro-Trump anti-democratic violence (“insurrectionist sentiments”) among US military v…
A Slow-Rolling Disaster: Assessing the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Militant Violence
Despite alarming predications about the Covid 19 pandemic that appear to fit the literature on the impact of natural disasters on civil wars, there are reasons to be suspicious that a rise in militant violence would likely occur quickly or uniformly. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is most definitely a disaster that caught the world by surprise, this “slow-rolling” shock differs in important ways from the more commonly studied acute onset natural …
The Political Geography of the January 6 Insurrectionists
What are the local political, economic, and social conditions of the communities that sent insurrectionists to the US Capitol in support of Donald Trump? Using a new dataset of the home counties of individuals charged for the Capitol insurrection, we tested two prominent theories of electoral populism and support for populist leaders like Donald Trump—demographic change and manufacturing decline—and whether they also explain violent populism. We …
Introducing the new CPOST dataset on suicide attacks
The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We assess global trends in suicide attacks over four decades, and demonstrate the value of the expanded DSAT…
Solving the Problem of Unattributed Political Violence
High rates of missing perpetrator information in political violence data pose a serious challenge for studies into militant group behavior and the microdynamics of conflict more generally. In this article we introduce multiple imputation (MI) as the best available method for minimizing the impact of missing perpetrator information on quantitative analyses of political violence, a method that can easily be incorporated into most quantitative resea…
Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence
Does the religious calendar promote or suppress political violence in Islamic societies? This study challenges the presumption that the predominant impact of the Islamic calendar is to increase violence, particularly during Ramadan. This study develops a new theory that predicts systematic suppression of violence on important Islamic holidays, those marked by public days off for dedicated celebration. We argue that militant actors anticipate soci…
Response to Roland Paris Article
Additional informationNotes on contributorsABOUT THE AUTHORRobert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism. He is one of the world's foremost experts on both strategic air power and terrorism, having published Cutting the Fuse: The Global Expansion of Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (2010), Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005…
Reconsidering the Cases of Humanitarian Intervention
October 01 2013 Reconsidering the Cases of Humanitarian Intervention Alex J. Bellamy, Alex J. Bellamy Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of International Security at Griffith University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Informa…
When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention
When should the United States and other members of the international community intervene to stop a government from harming its own citizens? Since World War II, the main standard for intervention has been the high bar of genocide, although the international community has rarely acted to stop it. The main alternative—the “responsibility to protect”—would set the bar so low that virtually every instance of anarchy or tyranny would create unbounded …
Introduction: What is New About Research on Terrorism
Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense, Argonne National Laboratories, and the Social Science Division of the University of Chicago for their generous support that made this special issue possible, and Chaim Kaufmann, Roger…
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Political scientist Robert Pape has created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. Here he provides a groundbreaking demographic profile of modern suicide terrorist attackers--and his findings offer a powerful counterpoint to conventional assumptions. He also examines the early practitioners of this guerrilla tactic, including the ancient Jewish Zealots, who in A.D. 66 wished to libe…
T he “G lobal W ar on T error ”: W hat H as B een L earned
Methods and Findings in the Study of Suicide Terrorism
Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay (2008) allege that I have committed the sin of sampling on the dependent variable by considering only the universe of suicide terrorist attacks rather than the universe of all imaginable instances when potential or actual terrorists might have committed suicide attacks, and so cannot measure the effects of any independent variables. They go on to describe a method that they say…
Soft Balancing against the United States
The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has wrongly promoted the view that the United States, as the leader of a unipolar system, can pursue such…
A Neater Way to Win [with Reply]
The True Worth of Air Power
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, advocates of precision air weapons have argued that wars can be won by selectively taking out an enemy's leaders, its communication systems, and the economic infrastructure of its major cities. Before the Persian GulfWar, Air Force Chiefof Staff General Michael Dugan promised to end the war in days by targeting Saddam Hussein directly. Later, in Kosovo, General Michael Short, commander of allied air forces in Europe, order…
The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of t…
Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade
Most of the major theoretical traditions in international relations offer little advice on how costly international moral action could be accomplished. The main exception is the constructivist approach that focuses on the spread of cosmopolitan ethical beliefs through transnational interaction. While the logic of this theory does not imply any limit on the scale of goals that might be achieved, most constructivist empirical work so far has focuse…
Evaluating Economic Sanctions
October 01 1998 Evaluating Economic Sanctions David A. Baldwin, David A. Baldwin David A. Baldwin is Ira D. Wallach Professor of World Order Studies at the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Schol…
Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work
July 01 1998 Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Online Issn: 1531-4804 Print Issn: 0162-2889 © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and o…
Evaluating Economic Sanctions
October 01 1998 Evaluating Economic Sanctions David A. Baldwin, David A. Baldwin David A. Baldwin is Ira D. Wallach Professor of World Order Studies at the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Schol…
The air force strikes back: A reply to Barry Watts and John Warden
Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work
October 01 1997 Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth Col…
Partition: An exit strategy for Bosnia
The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of t…
Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work
October 01 1997 Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth Col…
Soft Balancing against the United States
The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has wrongly promoted the view that the United States, as the leader of a unipolar system, can pursue such…
Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade
Most of the major theoretical traditions in international relations offer little advice on how costly international moral action could be accomplished. The main exception is the constructivist approach that focuses on the spread of cosmopolitan ethical beliefs through transnational interaction. While the logic of this theory does not imply any limit on the scale of goals that might be achieved, most constructivist empirical work so far has focuse…
Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work
July 01 1998 Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Online Issn: 1531-4804 Print Issn: 0162-2889 © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and o…
Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence
Does the religious calendar promote or suppress political violence in Islamic societies? This study challenges the presumption that the predominant impact of the Islamic calendar is to increase violence, particularly during Ramadan. This study develops a new theory that predicts systematic suppression of violence on important Islamic holidays, those marked by public days off for dedicated celebration. We argue that militant actors anticipate soci…
The limits of precision‐guided air power
(1997). The limits of precision‐guided air power. Security Studies: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 93-114
When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention
When should the United States and other members of the international community intervene to stop a government from harming its own citizens? Since World War II, the main standard for intervention has been the high bar of genocide, although the international community has rarely acted to stop it. The main alternative—the “responsibility to protect”—would set the bar so low that virtually every instance of anarchy or tyranny would create unbounded …
Methods and Findings in the Study of Suicide Terrorism
Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay (2008) allege that I have committed the sin of sampling on the dependent variable by considering only the universe of suicide terrorist attacks rather than the universe of all imaginable instances when potential or actual terrorists might have committed suicide attacks, and so cannot measure the effects of any independent variables. They go on to describe a method that they say…
Coercion and military strategy: Why denial works and punishment doesn't
Coercive Air Power in the Vietnam War
The air force strikes back: A reply to Barry Watts and John Warden
Why Japan Surrendered
The True Worth of Air Power
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, advocates of precision air weapons have argued that wars can be won by selectively taking out an enemy's leaders, its communication systems, and the economic infrastructure of its major cities. Before the Persian GulfWar, Air Force Chiefof Staff General Michael Dugan promised to end the war in days by targeting Saddam Hussein directly. Later, in Kosovo, General Michael Short, commander of allied air forces in Europe, order…
Solving the Problem of Unattributed Political Violence
High rates of missing perpetrator information in political violence data pose a serious challenge for studies into militant group behavior and the microdynamics of conflict more generally. In this article we introduce multiple imputation (MI) as the best available method for minimizing the impact of missing perpetrator information on quantitative analyses of political violence, a method that can easily be incorporated into most quantitative resea…
A Slow-Rolling Disaster: Assessing the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Militant Violence
Despite alarming predications about the Covid 19 pandemic that appear to fit the literature on the impact of natural disasters on civil wars, there are reasons to be suspicious that a rise in militant violence would likely occur quickly or uniformly. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is most definitely a disaster that caught the world by surprise, this “slow-rolling” shock differs in important ways from the more commonly studied acute onset natural …
The Political Geography of the January 6 Insurrectionists
What are the local political, economic, and social conditions of the communities that sent insurrectionists to the US Capitol in support of Donald Trump? Using a new dataset of the home counties of individuals charged for the Capitol insurrection, we tested two prominent theories of electoral populism and support for populist leaders like Donald Trump—demographic change and manufacturing decline—and whether they also explain violent populism. We …
Introduction: What is New About Research on Terrorism
Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense, Argonne National Laboratories, and the Social Science Division of the University of Chicago for their generous support that made this special issue possible, and Chaim Kaufmann, Roger…
Partition: An exit strategy for Bosnia
Introducing the new CPOST dataset on suicide attacks
The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We assess global trends in suicide attacks over four decades, and demonstrate the value of the expanded DSAT…
Evaluating Economic Sanctions
October 01 1998 Evaluating Economic Sanctions David A. Baldwin, David A. Baldwin David A. Baldwin is Ira D. Wallach Professor of World Order Studies at the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Schol…
Coercive Air Power in the Vietnam War
Coercion and military strategy: Why denial works and punishment doesn't
Why Japan Surrendered
The air force strikes back: A reply to Barry Watts and John Warden
Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work
October 01 1997 Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth Col…
Partition: An exit strategy for Bosnia
The limits of precision‐guided air power
(1997). The limits of precision‐guided air power. Security Studies: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 93-114
Evaluating Economic Sanctions
October 01 1998 Evaluating Economic Sanctions David A. Baldwin, David A. Baldwin David A. Baldwin is Ira D. Wallach Professor of World Order Studies at the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Schol…
Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work
July 01 1998 Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Online Issn: 1531-4804 Print Issn: 0162-2889 © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and o…
Evaluating Economic Sanctions
October 01 1998 Evaluating Economic Sanctions David A. Baldwin, David A. Baldwin David A. Baldwin is Ira D. Wallach Professor of World Order Studies at the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Schol…
Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade
Most of the major theoretical traditions in international relations offer little advice on how costly international moral action could be accomplished. The main exception is the constructivist approach that focuses on the spread of cosmopolitan ethical beliefs through transnational interaction. While the logic of this theory does not imply any limit on the scale of goals that might be achieved, most constructivist empirical work so far has focuse…
The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of t…
A Neater Way to Win [with Reply]
The True Worth of Air Power
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, advocates of precision air weapons have argued that wars can be won by selectively taking out an enemy's leaders, its communication systems, and the economic infrastructure of its major cities. Before the Persian GulfWar, Air Force Chiefof Staff General Michael Dugan promised to end the war in days by targeting Saddam Hussein directly. Later, in Kosovo, General Michael Short, commander of allied air forces in Europe, order…
Soft Balancing against the United States
The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has wrongly promoted the view that the United States, as the leader of a unipolar system, can pursue such…
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Political scientist Robert Pape has created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. Here he provides a groundbreaking demographic profile of modern suicide terrorist attackers--and his findings offer a powerful counterpoint to conventional assumptions. He also examines the early practitioners of this guerrilla tactic, including the ancient Jewish Zealots, who in A.D. 66 wished to libe…
T he “G lobal W ar on T error ”: W hat H as B een L earned
Methods and Findings in the Study of Suicide Terrorism
Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay (2008) allege that I have committed the sin of sampling on the dependent variable by considering only the universe of suicide terrorist attacks rather than the universe of all imaginable instances when potential or actual terrorists might have committed suicide attacks, and so cannot measure the effects of any independent variables. They go on to describe a method that they say…
Introduction: What is New About Research on Terrorism
Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense, Argonne National Laboratories, and the Social Science Division of the University of Chicago for their generous support that made this special issue possible, and Chaim Kaufmann, Roger…
When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention
When should the United States and other members of the international community intervene to stop a government from harming its own citizens? Since World War II, the main standard for intervention has been the high bar of genocide, although the international community has rarely acted to stop it. The main alternative—the “responsibility to protect”—would set the bar so low that virtually every instance of anarchy or tyranny would create unbounded …
Reconsidering the Cases of Humanitarian Intervention
October 01 2013 Reconsidering the Cases of Humanitarian Intervention Alex J. Bellamy, Alex J. Bellamy Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of International Security at Griffith University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Informa…
Response to Roland Paris Article
Additional informationNotes on contributorsABOUT THE AUTHORRobert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism. He is one of the world's foremost experts on both strategic air power and terrorism, having published Cutting the Fuse: The Global Expansion of Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (2010), Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005…
Solving the Problem of Unattributed Political Violence
High rates of missing perpetrator information in political violence data pose a serious challenge for studies into militant group behavior and the microdynamics of conflict more generally. In this article we introduce multiple imputation (MI) as the best available method for minimizing the impact of missing perpetrator information on quantitative analyses of political violence, a method that can easily be incorporated into most quantitative resea…
Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence
Does the religious calendar promote or suppress political violence in Islamic societies? This study challenges the presumption that the predominant impact of the Islamic calendar is to increase violence, particularly during Ramadan. This study develops a new theory that predicts systematic suppression of violence on important Islamic holidays, those marked by public days off for dedicated celebration. We argue that militant actors anticipate soci…
Introducing the new CPOST dataset on suicide attacks
The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We assess global trends in suicide attacks over four decades, and demonstrate the value of the expanded DSAT…
Political science (28 works) · Law (22 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Criminology (8 works) · Economics (8 works)